Supporters of M5S wave flags as they celebrate the election of Rome’s new mayor, Virginia Raggi, in June.
Photograph: Alessandro Di Meo/EPA

When the mayor of Rome and star of the Five Star movement, Virginia Raggi, recently suggested that the large number of refrigerators and furniture being dumped on the city’s streets was potentially a plot by her political enemies to undermine her, it was met with ridicule and anger.

#Frigogate, or #fridgegate, created an easy political opportunity for Italy’s centre-left prime minister, Matteo Renzi, who is fighting a tough battle before a critical referendum on 4 December on constitutional reform that could end his political career. He never misses an opportunity to paint his toughest political rivals – the populist Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) – as incompetent conspiracy theorists.

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“Honesty in politics is about being capable, and not playing around with demagoguery and indifference,” Renzi said. “If you’ve forgotten to renew the contract for large refuse removal, it’s not a conspiracy.”

Since its founding in 2009, M5S has been seen as a “post-ideological” protest party giving voice to disaffected Italians who were attracted to its vehement positions against corruption and crony capitalism. Its founder, Beppe Grillo, a comedian, had a loud megaphone, but was not seen a contender to run the country.

Beppe Grillo speaks during a rally three years ago. Photograph: Stefano Lancia/EPA

But today M5S is no longer on the sidelines of Italian politics. Instead, it is the second most popular party in the country and leading the campaign against Renzi’s referendum, which it says poses a threat to the country’s constitution. If Renzi loses, it could hasten the call for general elections before 2018, putting M5S within striking distance of the prime minister’s seat in Palazzo Chigi.

“The chances of the Five Star winning the next election are quite high, whether the referendum passes or not,” said Federico Santi, an analyst at Eurasia Group.

While it is clear that M5S is a force to be reckoned with, just what the party stands for – beyond its championing of “transparency” and “direct democracy” – is a much murkier question. Just as it lacks a clear leader in the conventional sense – it is not clear, for instance, who would be in the prime minister’s seat if it did one day enter Chigi – it presents voters with a hotchpotch of policies from across the ideological spectrum.

Unlike other populist movements in Europe that are clearly associated either with rightwing politics, such as Ukip in Britain, or with leftwing politics, such as Podemos in Spain, M5S has been able to attract votes across the political spectrum.

The leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, celebrates in Madrid after the results of the Spanish general election in June. Photograph: Kiko Huesca/EPA

Leftwing voters are attracted to its pro-environment stance and its criticism of big business. Rightwing voters support its call for controls on migration and its attacks on the EU and the euro. Grillo has long been an admirer of the former Ukip leader Nigel Farage, and M5S has said it would seek to call a referendum on the euro if it came into power.

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“The right in Italy is imploding, it does not exist. [Silvio] Berlusconi is gone and the rest is a diaspora, and they are trying to win these voters. For us, they are in the same category as [rightwing politicians] Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini,” said Morani.

Jacopo Iacoboni, a political journalist at La Stampa who covers M5S, said the party’s ties to the right have become more evident following Raggi’s election as mayor of Rome, when she decided to fill top posts with officials associated with a previous rightwing administration.

“I don’t want to say they are like a cult, but they repeat a kind of mantra when they talk about direct democracy and how you should only believe what you see on the internet, and not the newspapers,” he said, pointing out a similar distrust of traditional media outlets expressed by Donald Trump, the Republican US presidential nominee.

“I think there is a sort of cultural tie that connects the things that are happening abroad, in the USA and the UK and Italy and Russia,” Iacoboni said.

At the heart of it lies not only anger at the status quo, but distrust of elites and a tendency to “see plots everywhere and in everything”, he added.

Laura Ferrara, an MEP for M5S, where the movement is part of the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy Group along with Farage and Ukip, insists her party has been misunderstood and given unfair treatment in the Italian media.

“We are not on the leftwing or the rightwing. We are for what is logical and better for citizens. For instance, on the management of migrant flows, it is absolutely wrong that we are close to the rightwing,” she said, pointing to calls by Italy’s rightwing parties for all migrants and refugees to be expelled.

Ferrara said the M5S position was that more needed to be done to determine the differences between economic migrants and refugees fleeing war and to “protect the fundamental rights of citizens” who were unemployed. She said one solution favoured by M5S would be for refugees to obtain “humanitarian visas” from EU and other embassies in their countries of origin so they could avoid the dangerous passage across the Mediterranean. Creating “hotspots” to relocate refugees in other countries, she said, would “protect Italian citizens”.

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Asked about some of the less mainstream theories the party has supported, Ferrara denied M5S opposed vaccinations, but said it wanted to urge parents to be more vigilant about which vaccines they gave their children, saying that both the flu vaccine and varicella – or chickenpox – vaccine were portrayed by doctors as obligatory even though they were not mandatory by law. Both vaccines are recommended by the World Health Organisation.

“Well, it depends on the situation of each individual and we need to be aware of that,” she said, referring to the flu vaccine.

For political history professor Giovanni Orsina at LUISS University in Rome, the M5S phenomenon, much like the rise of Trump and Brexit, points to a general failure of mainstream politics.

“I think 20% of their supports believe in them, and 80% despise all the others,” he said. “Italian voters should start getting a greater sense of responsibility and reality. M5S is contributing to a sense of catastrophe, this is the first problem. The second is that the quality of their administrative elite is very low. So they are both miseducating the electorate and not governing well, and that causes real damage.”

Santi at Eurasia, which follows Italian politics, said the big question facing Italy now was not whether M5S could put the country on a Brexit-like track to abandon the euro, because that was likely to be too difficult procedurally and politically.

“The real problem is that they are highly inexperienced,” he said. Santi said he would worry about M5S’s response to economic challenges if they came into power, particularly since they seem to oppose any public intervention when it comes to saving troubled banks, and that their anti-austerity policies would put Italy on a collision course with the European commission.

“I think the Five Star movement didn’t come out of nowhere. They have a huge following in part because the traditional political class is completely inadequate for the job and people have real grievances,” Santi said. “So while I sympathise with those ideas, I think so far they have struggled to articulate a convincing response.”